From John Bazell “In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade—which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to ‘How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?’ is ‘Go fuck yourself,’ because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities.”
Try farming in Canada. I will actually use liters per acre as a unit to measure in liquid fertilizer into a sprayer, spray it at gallons per acre and drive the sprayer at kph with a pump pressure in PSI on a field that was surveyed in rods.
It'll get harvested by a machine that has all metric bolts and uses a 30' cutting platform, the grain will be measured in bushels on the yield monitor and sold in $/bushel with the selling agent but the contract will be in tonnes and delivered that way.
I stopped caring about British units in 1776! Metric all the way, baby! 🇺🇸 We decimalized their dumb ass currency and we need to finish the job with weights and measures! A vote for imperial units is a vote for red coats! Vote for me for President and I will liberate us from British tyranny! 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 🦅🦅🦅
It's possible! We can switch! I'm US born and raised and I voluntarily switched to metric in college. It took me maybe we few months to start building an intuition for Celsius, grams, liters, and meters. And that was with me in isolation. I would imagine it would be much faster if everyone else was also transitioning.
Over the years, other people have asked me about this and I've been shocked at how many people don't realize most of the world uses metric. Someone asked why I was using "Mexico units" once... Also, I've met lots of people who think the US invented inches, pounds, etc, which is... uh... interesting. The arguments y'all are having here are way more advanced than what I've run into.
For anyone who wants to voluntarily switch, I highly recommend not to convert between imperial and metric. Just read the metric number and that's it. The weather says it's 25c outside? Don't convert to F. Go outside, experience 25c. Over time you'll build an intuition. Smartphones and computers have made the switch easier these days.
Of course, until we all switch you'll really end up being bilingual...
1l of (4°C) water weighs 1kg.
1kg (of anything) is 1000g.
1g of water is 1cm³.
Stack 1000 1cm³ blocks to get a 10m high column.
This column exerts 100kPa of pressure on its base.
To heat it by 1°C requires 1kcal.
And 1N would accelerate it by 1m/s every second.
I've posted this before on my mastodon, and on feddit.de, before the instance was shut down, but I think it's still a nice showcase how SI units interact with one another.
The worst thing we have in the metric system is kWh/1000h. It's just watts, but whoever designed the energy labels thought a bunch of zeros would be funny or something.
The US Government is entirely metric. It’s just the US Citizens that aren’t. So there’s this entire separation where no one uses metric, so nothing is made for metric, since nothing is made for metric, no one uses metric.
Obviously that’s changing over time plenty of people use a mixture of both systems all the time. The machines are mostly driving adoption at this point. 3D printers, cars, etc.
My comparison is that the metric system is like color vision. It's like colors for traffic lights, but USC people insist it's fine memorizing which light is which location. In metric you just see the world in a way USC can't, but USC people insist they're just fine.
And the most ridiculous (or inclusive) thing are tiresizes in Europe (perhaps somewhere else, too?).
195/55r16
195 is the width in millimeters
55 is the height in percentage of the width
R16 is the radius of the wheel in inches
Y'all preach about how much better the metric system is because it's base ten and super intuitive, then measure weather temperature on a scale from -20C to 40C 🥴
This is among the dumbest internet arguments ever.
G20/G21. The machines don't care, my digital calipers, micrometers, rulers, and 3D CAD software don't care which system is being used. So why should I have my undies in a bunch about which is better? I use the measurement system best suited for the task at hand - whether that's metric, US customary, or light years.
As for not knowing how many inches are in a mile, that's about the stupidest internet point ever. No one cares about that, well maybe some civil engineer might need to very rarely care in some unusual situation. The scale of measurement is wrong for inches. In fact, most people don't care much about the actual distance away something is, they mostly care about how long does it take to get there. The odds are pretty good you have no idea how far it is from your front door to the grocery store in miles or kilometers. But you DO know how long it takes to get there. Whether by foot, bike, bus, or car.
What 'has' we done. Well, they didn't go to school, that's for sure. And clearly they didn't send their kids to school either, as it's a damn old poster and it's been more then a hundred years while the US still uses imperial.